316 papers
Molecular biology explores the tiny machinery inside living cells, revealing how genetic instructions are read, copied, and turned into the proteins that keep us alive. This field acts as a bridge between the static code of DNA and the dynamic processes that drive growth, disease, and life itself, offering insights into everything from cellular repair to the development of new medicines.
On Gist.Science, we track every new preprint uploaded to bioRxiv in this category to make these complex discoveries accessible to everyone. Our team processes each submission to provide both clear, plain-language explanations and detailed technical summaries, ensuring you can grasp the core findings without getting lost in dense academic jargon.
Below are the latest molecular biology papers freshly processed from bioRxiv, ready for you to explore and understand.
By elucidating the asymmetric tetrameric structure of the piggyBat transpososome, researchers engineered an obligate heterodimeric system that combines catalytic and non-catalytic subunits with TALE domains to achieve over 98% targeted genomic integration while preventing auto-destructive cleavage.
This study reveals that the metazoan-specific SF3B3/SF3B5 submodule of the U2 snRNP coordinates RNA Polymerase II elongation through a splicing-independent mechanism by recruiting transcriptional kinases and regulatory complexes to chromatin.
This paper introduces FLiPA, a versatile and robust fluorescent liposome plate assay that enables the quantitative analysis of protein-glycosphingolipid interactions by systematically controlling membrane and buffer compositions to dissect key molecular determinants such as cholesterol content, membrane order, and ionic strength.
This paper introduces RAMFISH, an accessible, open-source, and modular workflow that enables robust, semi-quantitative spatial profiling of over 30 mRNAs in intact tissues through iterative hybridization and a fully automated analysis pipeline.
Short-term dietary methionine starvation reprograms hepatic m6A RNA methylation dynamics by inducing de novo diurnal oscillations in key metabolic and signaling genes, thereby establishing m6A modification as a critical mechanism linking methionine metabolism to circadian regulation and homeostasis.
This study utilizes cryo-electron microscopy to reveal the structure of the apo-PIWIL4-HSP90 complex, demonstrating that HSP90 binds and unfolds the PIWI linker domain to stabilize a unique open conformation, a mechanism conserved across PIWI proteins and essential for piRNA biogenesis.
This study demonstrates that dynamic histone lysine methylation and demethylation in the wood frog liver serve as a critical epigenetic mechanism for transcriptional regulation, enabling the animal's survival during prolonged anoxia and freezing by modulating gene expression to support hypometabolism and stress adaptation.
This study demonstrates that pharmacologically inducing autophagy with rapamycin accelerates intestinal repair and improves survival in mice following acute whole-body irradiation, whereas inhibiting autophagy with chloroquine exacerbates radiation-induced gastrointestinal injury.
This study characterizes the aging plasma extracellular vesicle proteome in mice using a species-agnostic mass spectrometry approach, revealing age-correlated protein signatures, sex-specific differences, and novel biomarkers that enable the construction of a highly accurate proteomic clock for monitoring aging and healthspan.
FlexRibbon is a novel protein foundation model that jointly pretrains on amino acid sequences and 3D structures using a combination of masked language modeling and diffusion-based denoising, achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks—particularly in mutation-rich regimes where traditional MSA-based methods struggle—without relying on multiple sequence alignments.